gogobee/gogobee_long_expedition_plan.md

Long Expeditions — multi-session plan

Goal: dungeon expeditions become real multi-day journeys (T1 ≈ 2 days → T5 ≈ 7 days). Player picks camp supplies at launch, then watches it play out. Camp pitch/break, elite engagement, and boss engagement all become autonomous. Foreground !camp / !fight survive as overrides, not the expected path.

1. Why the current shape is "too short"

Tier	Zones	Rooms	Real-time exit
T1	Goblin Warrens, Crypt Valdris	6–7	usually <1 calendar day
T2	Forest Shadows, Sunken Temple	7–8	usually 1 day
T3	Manor Blackspire, Underforge	7–9	1–2 days
T4	Underdark, Feywild Crossing	8–10 (×regions)	2–3 days
T5	Dragon's Lair, Abyss Portal	9–10 (×regions)	2–4 days

(Room counts from internal/plugin/dnd_zone.go:70-134; tier zones from memory project_expedition_difficulty.)

Because the autopilot walks ~3 rooms / 2h (expedition_autorun.go:43,53) and boss/elite stops are manual, a player who pays attention clears T1–T3 in an evening. Briefing/recap UTC ticks fire but rarely matter — the expedition is over before "day 2" ever lands.

2. Target shape

Tier	Target duration	New room budget (single-region)	Notes
T1	2 days	12–14	one autopilot-camp
T2	3 days	16–20	two camps
T3	4 days	22–26	three camps; threat starts to bite
T4	5–6 days	28–34 (split across 3–4 regions)	base camp emerges
T5	7 days	36–44 (split across 3–4 regions)	full siege/temporal pressure

(Numbers are first-draft anchors; class-balance sim drives the actual dial in D7.)

Duration is measured in expedition-days advanced by autopilot camp, not real-time UTC days. Each autopilot night-camp = day++. Real-time UTC still drives the morning briefing DM cadence, but day-count and supply burn become event-driven (camp = sleep = day++ = burn).

The autopilot decides:

• when to camp (and which camp type)
• whether to engage elites and bosses, or to camp first and retry
• whether to extract early on starvation/HP collapse

The player decides:

• supply pack purchases at launch (only meaningful pre-expedition choice)
• whether to override (!camp <kind>, !fight, !expedition extract)

3. Phasing

Built across multiple sessions; each phase ships independently with tests and a small DM-side feedback loop.

D1 — Length + room-count rework

Files: dnd_zone.go (per-zone Min/MaxRooms), dnd_expedition_region.go (multi-region region sizes), dnd_zone_run.go:generateRoomSequence (still terminates Entry → … → Elite → Boss, but with more Explorations). Work:

• Re-pitch Min/MaxRooms per zone to the table in §2.
• Multi-region zones: extend per-region room budgets so the total stays in band when summed.
• Keep the fixed Entry / Trap / Elite / Boss anchors; only Exploration count scales.
• Consider 2 traps + 2 elites for T4–T5 to break up the long middle (deferred decision — see §6).
• Update existing zone graphs in zone_graph_*.go for the new lengths. Auditing whether each zone has a hand-tuned graph or relies on the linear compiler is part of D1 scoping.

Exit criteria: expedition-sim shows mean-room-cleared per zone in the new band; no test fixtures hard-code old counts.

D2 — Autopilot camp scheduler

D2-a (shipped 2026-05-27): new expedition_autocamp.go with pure decideAutopilotCamp + pitchAutopilotCamp + dwell-window lifecycle (shouldSkipAutoRunForCamp, breakAutoCampIfDue). Wired into tryAutoRun: skip while inside minAutoCampDwell (4h), break + walk past it, post-walk scheduler pitches HP-low rest camps and region-boss base-camp waypoints. CampState gained AutoPitched so auto- vs player-pitched lifetimes diverge. Day rollover is still UTC-anchored; D2-b moves it event-anchored.

Files: new expedition_autocamp.go; hooks in expedition_autorun.go:tryAutoRun; reuse dnd_expedition_camp.go:campPitch / applyCampRest. Heuristics (in priority order):

1. Day-budget pacing — pitch when rooms-walked-this-day ≥ tier-specific day-room target. Standard if room cleared, rough if not.
2. Resource gates — pitch if HP < 35% of max, or supplies projected to cover <1 more day's burn (exp.Supplies.Current < exp.Supplies.DailyBurn * harshMod).
3. Post-elite breath — auto-pitch a standard camp in the cleared elite room.
4. Region boss cleared in multi-region zone — auto-pitch base camp at first eligible site.
5. Don't pitch when mid-fight, in a trap/boss room, in a fork-pending state, or already camped.

Auto-break already happens on move (autoBreakCampOnMove in dnd_expedition_camp.go:401). Autopilot just needs to not break a freshly-pitched camp by immediately walking on — gate by time.Since(camp.EstablishedAt) > minCampDwell (15min real-time? or simply: don't auto-walk while camped).

Day-rollover semantics change (decided event-anchored): today, day++ happens at the 06:00 UTC briefing (dnd_expedition_cycle.go:236). After D2, the autopilot night-camp pitch is the event that fires day++, supply burn, overnight rest, and threat drift — in one atomic rollover the camp scheduler triggers. The 06:00 UTC briefing tick survives only as a re-engagement DM anchor (and a safety net: if for some reason no camp pitched in N hours, force one). Concretely:

• Move the body of deliverBriefing (dnd_expedition_cycle.go:186-) into a processNightCamp(exp) helper called from the autopilot camp scheduler when it pitches a night camp (rough/standard/fortified — not mid-day breath stops).
• Distinguish "night camp" (advances day) from "rest stop" (doesn't). Heuristic: a camp pitched at the end of the day-budget room count is night; one pitched purely for HP/SU recovery mid-day is a rest stop. Both apply applyCampRest; only night also runs supply burn + day++ + threat drift.
• The existing UTC briefing ticker becomes: if last_briefing_at is older than ~20h and the user is active, post a "Day N — here's where you stand" re-engagement DM. It calls no mutators.
• Manual !camp <type> from the player still does what it does today (apply rest immediately) but also counts as a night camp if invoked with no other camp today — keep parity with the autopilot behavior so the override doesn't accidentally stall day advancement.

Migration: in-flight expeditions at deploy time keep their existing 06:00 UTC day++ until they end (fence by start_date). New expeditions use the event-anchored model.

Exit criteria: sim shows autopilot pitches the right kind of camp at the right room with no player input; supply economy still survives a 7-day T5.

D3 — Autonomous elite + boss engagement

Files: dnd_zone_cmd.go:497-535 (the prev==RoomElite / RoomBoss branch). Work:

• Background autopilot (compact==true): drop the prev == RoomBoss carve-out. Boss auto-resolves through the same forward-sim path as elites.
• Safety gate before boss: if HP < 80% of max OR supplies < 1 day's burn OR active "low" status, autopilot pitches a camp instead of engaging. Retry next tick.
• Loss handling: a death on auto-resolved boss still kicks the player-death narration and ends the run. No special treatment.
• Foreground !fight still works (manual override). Foreground !expedition run still stops at boss for the player who wants to watch.

Open question: do we want a "set autopilot off" toggle for players who actively want to play the boss themselves? My take: default-on, single-flag per expedition (autopilot_engage) settable at start or via !expedition autopilot off. Defer until D3 lands and we see how it reads.

Exit criteria: sim runs a full T5 expedition launch → boss kill with zero player commands besides !expedition start.

D4 — DM volume + day surfaces

The big risk: a 7-day T5 with autopilot walking, camping, fighting elites, and killing bosses will spam DMs unless we bundle. The user has already pushed back on recap chatter (feedback_skip_recaps). Work:

• One end-of-day DM per autopilot night-camp, bundling: rooms walked, fights resolved, loot, camp pitched, day++ event. Replaces today's per-room auto-walk DM in compact mode.
• One morning re-engagement DM when the player first opens the channel after a day-rollover (anchored to user activity, not UTC clock — drops the 06:00 wakeup if the player isn't around).
• Boss kill + run-complete still get their own DM (the climax beat, not bundled).
• TwinBee voice: first-person only (feedback_twinbee_voice).
• No trailing recaps (feedback_skip_recaps).

Exit criteria: a 7-day T5 produces ≤ 10 DMs across the whole expedition (1 launch + 6 end-of-day + 1 boss + 1 run-complete + 1 emergency).

D5 — Supplies economics retune

Files: dnd_expedition.go:38-47 (ExpeditionSupplies), pack-purchase surface (E1b), applyDailyBurn. Work:

• New pack tiers sized for 2-day → 7-day. Max packs scale with intended duration. Today's caps (PacksStandard ≤ 3, PacksDeluxe ≤ 1) are a 2-day shape.
• DailyBurn: keep zone-tier scaling, but the autopilot's camp choices now consume meaningful SU per day — so Max headroom needs to roughly equal DailyBurn × intendedDays × 1.3 (slop).
• Surface supply purchase at launch as a single "Pick your loadout" prompt with 3–4 presets ("Lean: 2-day shape", "Balanced", "Heavy: full T5"), with raw pack counts as an advanced override.
• Forage and Ranger forage tuning re-baseline.

Exit criteria: balanced loadout completes intended-duration expedition in ≥ 85% of sim runs without starvation extraction.

D6 — Player-facing surface cleanup

• Help text rewrite — frame expedition as "supply pack + watch it play out".
• Hide / soft-deprecate !camp <type> from primary help, keep it documented as an override.
• !fight still in help, framed as override.
• Status DM (!expedition status) shows: current day / expected days, rooms walked / total, supplies, last 3 events.

D7 — Sim + class re-baseline

• cmd/expedition-sim extensions: multi-day mode, autopilot camp, autopilot boss.
• Re-run the class win-rate corpus (cross-link project_class_balance, project_j2_sim_artifact).
• Re-check trailers (bard/cleric per project_j1_post_sweep_findings) — autopilot camp pacing may relieve their HP-cliff issue.
• New balance memory entry once corpus stabilizes.

4. Cross-cutting risks

• Existing in-flight expeditions at deploy time. Either fence by start_date (old expeditions finish under old rules) or write a one-shot migration that retunes their room counts. Lean: fence — these are typically <2 days.
• The 24h zone-run inactivity timeout (dnd_zone_run.go:254) — must be raised, or the autopilot must self-poke last_action_at per tick. With multi-day expeditions, a quiet stretch overnight is now expected.
• Idle reaper (commit 0f72484, see expedition_autorun.go references) — already holds streak on autopilot; verify it tolerates 5-day expeditions.
• Babysit perk — BabysitSafeRest already upgrades Standard → Fortified at rest (dnd_expedition_camp.go:241-245); confirm interaction with autopilot picking Standard (no change needed; the upgrade fires inside applyCampRest).
• Multi-region travel still unwired in autopilot (memory project_multiregion_travel_unwired). For T4/T5 to actually take 5–7 days, autopilot must auto-advance regions on region-clear. D2/D3 covers this implicitly but call it out — likely a small dedicated commit.
• Pet arrival (memory project_pet_event_reachability) — emergence seam is at run-complete; longer expedition just delays the roll, no code change needed.
• Twinbee voice + secret NPC buffs (memories feedback_twinbee_voice, feedback_npc_buffs_are_secret) — none of the new copy can break these.

5. Schema impact

Likely none. Existing columns cover it:

• current_day → autopilot increments via advanceExpeditionDay.
• camp_json, supplies_json, region_state, threat_* already in place.
• One possible new column: expected_days int (set at launch from zone tier + loadout) so status/end-of-day DMs can render "Day 3/5". Cheaper to derive than store — defer.

6. Open questions for next session

1. Day-advance semantics — decided 2026-05-27: event-anchored. day++ fires on autopilot camp-pitch (autopilot night-camp = sleep = day burn + briefing). UTC clock becomes a re-engagement-DM anchor only, not a state mutator. See §3-D2 for implementation impact.
2. Boss autopilot default: always-on, opt-out, or opt-in? My lean: always-on with a per-expedition opt-out flag; revisit after D3 reads.
3. Per-tier room counts: the table in §2 is a starting point. Worth a sim pass before D1 commits — or fine to ship a guess and refine in D7?
4. Extra anchor rooms: T4/T5 with one elite + one trap may feel thin spread over 30+ rooms. Add a second elite mid-zone, or rely on multi-region + patrols + threat for variety?
5. Mobile/AFK friendliness: should the autopilot-DM cadence aim for "1 DM per real-time evening" regardless of room count, or "1 DM per in-game day" (which could be hours apart if the player set the pacing fast)?

7. Sequence

D1 → D2 → D3 (independent of D4/D5) → D5 → D4 → D6 → D7.

D2 and D3 can land in either order; D4 needs the volume problem to be real (so after D2/D3 at minimum). D5 wants D1's new lengths but can run in parallel with D2/D3. D7 always last.

Estimated sessions: 5–7. D2 and D5 are the biggest single-session chunks.